Unspeakable Discovery: Romanticism and the … Discovery: Romanticism and the ... where the...

Unspeakable Discovery: Romanticism and the “Rime of theAncient Mariner”

Matthias Rudolf∗

University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA

Coleridge’s investment in aesthetics and criticism has broadly been understood asan attempt to overcome the Kantian bargain by which knowledge of the world isgained by relinquishing the thing in itself. This paper seeks to supplement thatunderstanding by recasting the stakes of Kant’s critical philosophy in terms of aconflict over the limits and possibility of “discovery.” Drawing on contemporaryaccounts of discovery by Captain Cook and George Shelvocke, the essayexplores the critical role discovery plays in the “The Rime of the AncientMariner” as an historical practice of maritime expansion and mapping, as atextual event, and as an integral moment in the practice of literary criticism,which is to say, of “reading.” Maritime discovery in the Rime, the essay argues,allegorizes literary criticism, revealing both the promise and the limits of theromantic conception of literature as containing its own criticism.

This essay reads Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as a poetic engage-ment with discovery as well as a critical reflection on it. Discovery in the Rime concernsnot only the history and problematics of maritime exploration, but extends morebroadly to the relation of literature and criticism. The Rime has come to be acceptedas a paradigmatically romantic poem, one in which Romanticism and romantic aes-thetics lie ready to be discovered by a critical reader.1 Coleridge continually revisedit, called it a “poem of pure imagination,” and in closing the Biographia Literaria’schapter on the imagination promised to make up for its missing derivation of the“powers and privileges of the imagination” in an essay “prefixed to the poem of TheAncient Mariner” (1: 306). The essay never did appear, its place taken instead by theepigraph from Burnet with which he replaced the earlier “Argument(s)” of the Rime.That Coleridge, as so often in his life, did not deliver on his promises does notdetract from the Rime as an exemplary poetic and romantic work; on the contrary, itrather suggests that the Rime stands in for, and in some relation to, the difficulties Coler-idge encountered in his endeavor to provide literary criticism with a solid philosophicalfoundation. Coleridge’s philosophical project and his investment in the literary aes-thetic has often been read through the critical lens of Kant and the questions that ani-mated German Romanticism; indeed the Biographia Literaria parallels the attempts ofKant’s successors (Fichte and Schelling, whom Coleridge’s failed deduction translatesto the point of plagiarism), as well as the early German Romantics around the Schlegelbrothers, Novalis and Holderlin in Jena, to complete Kant’s critical system by positingliterature and the literary aesthetic as the locus where the supersensible could be pre-sented substantially, rather than merely analogically as Kant had insisted. To thisnew conception, the disciplinary formation of literary studies and criticism owes its

# 2013 Taylor & Francis

∗Email: [email protected]

European Romantic Review, 2013Vol. 24, No. 2, 185–210, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2013.766401

historical beginnings.2 This paper does not abandon that perspective, but seeks to sup-plement it by reading the relation of Romanticism, literature, and criticism through thetopos of “discovery.”3 Indeed, I suggest that maritime discovery in the Rime allegorizesliterary criticism, and moreover that the material and literary practices of discovery,especially maritime discovery, participate in the formation of the romantic conceptionof literature as containing its own criticism.4

Discovery harbors an epistemological difficulty rooted in the non-identity of the“event” of discovery and the “matter of fact” it makes available. To take the well-worn example of Newton’s apple, although the event – Newton’s discovering – is dis-tinct from what is discovered – gravity – the discovered matter of fact nonetheless onlybecomes available in and through the event of discovery. Conversely, while the eventof discovery is contingent on the prior existence of the matter of fact discovered, it isnot determined by the characteristics of the discovered object, just as Newton’s disco-vering, apples notwithstanding, is not determined by gravity itself. The predicamentconstitutive of each discovery, which is also its challenge and difficulty, is that the“event” and “matter of fact” of discovery are inextricably and contingently linkedeven as they remain irreducibly discontinuous. The claim to have discovered – thata discovery was made, that it took place – requires the exposition and representationof this non-identity. Since discoveries need to be recognized and attested by othersas matters of fact, and since the claim to have been “the first” necessarily excludesthose others from the event of discovery, representations of discovery involve a para-doxical task: they must produce the conditions for the iterability and verification of thediscovery, divorcing it from its “first” event, while they must at the same time securetheir claim to that discovery by portraying the event as the condition of possibility ofthat knowledge. Discoveries are in this sense always “poetic,” precariously constitutedin the representation of the relation of the “event” and “matter of fact” that occasionedthem – not only by their discoverers, but also by those to whom the discoveries areaddressed and others who verify, repeat, and transmit that discovery.

The form of the Rime allegorizes, even presents itself as, a compendium of thispoetic process of discovery; it is not just a first-hand account of the Mariner’s discov-ery. That the Mariner, compelled by an agony that returns “at an uncertain hour” (ll.419) tells the tale over and over again, that it is then again retold uncounted times,written down, redacted, glossed, modified by others, indicates both the Rime’s multipleauthorship (by minstrels, balladeers, editors), and its constitution by the multiple formsof recognition and transmission of that discovery.5 The question of discovery in theRime concerns not just the Mariner’s discovery of the silent sea, but also the questionof how the Rime represents discovery and what it is the Rime discovers (which is notnecessarily the same thing the Mariner discovers). The difficulty lies therein that each ofits layers – the Mariner’s voyage; the telling of the tale to the Wedding Guest; the bal-ladeer’s recounting of the event of that telling; the 1798 written record of the ballad; therevisions of the poem from 1800 to 1830; the addition of the editorial gloss in 1817 –rewrites the previous ones, entails erasures and supplements, and so blurs the distinc-tions and boundaries between them. Hence the event of discovery always appears mul-tiply; it is plural, spread across the fabric of the text by a network of references, byfigural displacements, repetitions, erasures, and supplementations.

To read the Rime as a poem of discovery rather than as a poem of guilt and redemp-tion or a work of “pure imagination” is not a new undertaking. When William Empsonobserved in 1972 that “[the Rime] is about adventure and discovery; it celebrates andepitomizes the maritime expansion of the Europeans,” he recapitulated what John

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Livingstone Lowes in 1927 left implicit in his Road to Xanadu: that Coleridge’s “poemof pure imagination” was rooted in the historical experience and logic of maritime andcolonial expansion (Poems 28).6 In Lowes’ eyes, Coleridge’s Rime epitomized the“assimilating power” of the imagination: its capacity to “transmute” and “metamor-phose” – “translate” – “fragments picked up from books of travel” and the “flotsamand jetsam of seafaring and shipwreck” into the “immortal shapes compact of the uni-versal truth of poetry” (115–16). In The Road to Xanadu, a text curiously devoid ofinterpretation, Lowes set out “to discover how . . . out of chaos the imaginationframes a thing of beauty” (xi) and in the process meticulously documented thesources of the Rime, to the point of demonstrating its word-for-word indebtedness tocontemporary travel narratives. But whereas Lowes regarded the Rime as “the compen-dium and symbol of a process of immense significance” (116), metonymically aligningthe work of the imagination with the discoveries of maritime expansion and a narrativeof human progress, modern historicist criticism, conscious and suspicious of the ten-dency of the romantic imagination to elide, repress and aestheticize the violence ofthe colonial encounter and its aftermath, has instead focused on the ways the Rimetakes up and reflects Britain’s imperial and colonial involvement. Over the last twodecades, following Empson’s lead, and seeking to counter the reception of the Rimeas a symbolic parable of sin, guilt and redemption or as psychological allegory, aseries of assiduously researched historicist and post-colonial readings resituated thepoem in its social, political and historical contexts, drawing out the intertextual connec-tions of the Rime to (not only Coleridge’s statements on) colonialism, the slave-trade,and colonial disease.7 In the process, they have enriched our understanding of theRime’s and, by extension, Romanticism’s ambivalent and difficult engagement withthe legacy of colonial conquest and discovery.

Yet historicist readings have taken it as a matter of course that the question of dis-covery in the Rime, beginning with, but not limited to, the Mariner’s claim that “Wewere the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea,” is first and foremost a question ofits engagement with and reference to the social, political, and historical conditionsand effects of the discovery of the New World. Taking the Rime as “a compositevoyage alluding to the originary moments in European maritime exploration . . . fromMagellan . . . to Cook,” in Levy’s elegant formulation (694), these readings soughtthe meaning of discovery in its intertextual relation to the historical archive. Hencethe labor of the historicist critic itself became a labor of discovery: to unearth and recon-struct a historicized network of discursive references, textual borrowings and influencesthat relate the Rime to the projects of geographical and scientific discovery.8 Reading,as a (disciplinary) practice of discovery, thus all too easily became a matter of identify-ing references and of mapping the text onto a pre-existing field of reference. Thisessay’s focus on discovery as both an historically contingent and institutionalized prac-tice of maritime colonial expansion and as an integral part of the practice of literary cri-ticism, which is to say, of “reading,” traces a different but related itinerary. Inasmuch asmodernity is made possible and even actualized by the Cartesian idea of method, asPfau argues (961), and inasmuch as discovery designates the radical contingency ofthe event of the new entering into knowledge, discovery appears as an always prolifer-ating site of the struggle to define the conditions and terms in which modernity comes tocharacterize itself, its past, and its future aspirations. In this sense, the Rime figures as aliterary and historical site in and over which that struggle is carried out.

At the close of the Critique of Pure Reason’s transcendental analytic, Kant, in apassage that seems to echo Coleridge’s Mariner before the fact, raises the question

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of criticism’s task in terms of a contest between mapping and maritime discovery. Thepassage follows on the transcendental analytic’s argument that the grounds of all poss-ible knowledge, and so the “source of all truth” (354), were the principles of pure under-standing. Mapping, in the sense that Kant uses it, involves the “empirical use of therules of the understanding,” which represent “the agreement of our cognition withobjects of possible experience,” i.e. “matters of fact” – phaenomena, appearances,or beings of sense (355; 360). Maritime discovery, on the other hand, denotes the“transcendental use” of the a priori principles of the understanding, an employmentthat would extend their reach beyond all appearances to “things in general and in them-selves” – to the very being of things as things, Kant’s noumena, about whose meaningColeridge was so skeptical.9 Kant wrote:

We have now traveled through the land of pure understanding, and carefully inspectedeach part of it, but we have also surveyed it and determined the place for each thing init. But this land is an island, and enclosed in unalterable boundaries by nature itself. Itis the land of truth (a charming name), surrounded by a broad and stormy ocean, thetrue seat of illusion, where many a fog bank and rapidly melting iceberg pretend to benew lands and, ceaselessly deceiving with empty hopes the mariner [Seefahrer]looking around for new discoveries, entwine him in adventures from which he cannever escape and yet also never bring to an end. But before we venture out on this sea,to search through all its breadth and become certain of whether there is anything tohope for in it, it will be useful first to cast yet another glance at the map of the land wewould now leave, and to ask, first, whether we could not be satisfied with what it contains,or even must be satisfied with it out of necessity, if there is no other ground on which wecould build; and, second, by what title we occupy even this land, and can hold it securelyagainst all hostile claims. (Kritik 267–68; Critique 354; translation modified).

Kant imagines a scene in which, poised on the shores of the land of pure understanding,“we” are about to set foot on a ship hoping to make new discoveries and to extend thereach of our understanding and knowledge. Kant hesitates and, unsure not merely of thevoyage’s necessity but even if it might be necessary to forgo the voyage for the sake ofpreserving the knowledge already gained, glances at the map – at the transcendentalanalytic – he had drawn up. Discovery holds both a promise and a threat, and the “criti-cal investigation” (355) Kant proposes is to bring the former closer to fulfillment andguard against the latter. “We” might say two things here: first, any discovery thatmight occur will already be constrained by the map, and, second, Kant’s gestureturns a question of maritime discovery into a question of reading, where what is tobe discovered is the possibility of discovery itself.

Should “we” set sail, then? Kant first points out that even if the map were the sourceof all truth, it doesn’t seem to us enough to be lectured merely on what is true. And werethe “critical investigation” to provide nothing more than what we already know to betrue, if it would produce only more maps of what is already known, the undertaking“would not be worth the expenditure and preparation” (355). Yet no curiosity is“more disadvantageous to the expansion of our knowledge” than that which presumesto know the use of its discoveries in advance. And that is exactly the risk of reading themap. An understanding that is content with truth, i.e. one that occupies itself only withits empirical use, with maps and mapping, “does not reflect on the sources of its knowl-edge” and for this reason cannot “determine for itself the boundaries of its use andknowing what may lie within and without its whole sphere” (355). Ultimately uncriti-cal, such reading inevitably oversteps its “natural boundaries” and can never “be sure ofits claims and possession” (355). Yet much the same thing turns out to be true about

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discovery. Not content with what has merely been expounded as true and seeking “thatwhich one has desired to know,” discovery deceives itself by “substituting the logicalpossibility of concepts for the transcendental possibility of things” (358), and so envel-opes itself in tautologies and contradictions from which it cannot escape.10 Given overto the desire to know and left to their own devices, neither mapping nor discovery pro-duces secure or true knowledge, since both transgress and abandon the “unalterableboundaries” of the land of pure understanding.

The task of criticism thus consists in tracing the limits of the true, and it will involvea limitation and redefinition of discovery in relation to mapping. We can catch aglimpse of this in Kant’s aside that “the deep inquiries we have undertaken [are] requi-site to that end [of determining the boundaries of the true]” (355). Insofar as these “deepinquiries” refer to the transcendental analytic, the voyage of discovery has already beenmade, the map “we” are glancing at charted during its course, which (for us) has yet tocome to an end (we are discovering discovery, as it were). With Kant, and as readers ofhis map, “we” are always in two places at once: still on the island waiting to set sail andalready on his ship, reading and testing the limits of maps. On the other hand, and as thefigure of “rapidly melting icebergs” already suggests, Kant goes on to argue that dis-covery ought not to be concerned with “objects of our senses” but with the absolutelynegative entities he calls noumena: that which is left of the iceberg as iceberg once ithas melted away, as it were (360). Located beyond the domain of sensibility, noumenafunction as “boundary concepts,” and designate a radically empty form of possibleknowledge into whose possibility even discovery can have no insight. A critical discov-ery thus marks the event of an “unknown something” in thought that, despite andbecause of its radical negativity, does not repudiate all knowledge as such. Rather,the event of this discovery (it is a mere event, with no matter of fact proper to it)results in a “negative expansion” that limits the mapping activity of the understandingand simultaneously “sets boundaries for itself” by only thinking things “under the nameof an unknown something” and refusing the temptation to knowledge to cognize themas such (363).

Kant’s “critical investigation” thus effects a figural reversal: discovery finds itselfenclosed by the very “boundaries” that delineate the “land of truth” (no wonder,then, that discovery happens on the map), while the mapping activity of the understand-ing encounters a limit, not of sensibility, but of critical thought. Discovery takes theplace of mapping, and mapping that of discovery. Criticism, we might say, translatesdiscovery into mapping and, in so doing, enables the mapping of discoveries and safe-guards the possibility of knowledge by limiting the reach of reason. But inasmuch as ittakes place at the limit of knowledge, criticism exposes itself to an encounter with thatwhich can neither be posited nor grasped as such by thought, to an event of discoverythat in limiting the understanding inscribes itself in the representation of the “true.” Inthis sense, discoveries are unspeakable – they cannot be articulated or substantially pre-sented but as the figure of a boundary that “encloses” a truth it does not as much revealas make possible. They appear, we might say, as figures of translation, as the outline ofwhat they are not but yet make possible.

In a general sense, to translate is a matter of reading and giving an account of thatreading, of giving an equivalent of a text, of saying (or writing) what one thinks in thewords of others (we do not ever own the words we employ). But it is also to carry asomething – an “it” – from one place to another, as if across a divide, over an obstacle,geographical, textual, or otherwise. In both of these senses, to translate is to representfor the first time something that was elsewhere, but not yet here. Translation discovers


– it carries over and makes intelligible in a familiar idiom what was unknown, evenforeign and strange, much as Cook’s A Voyage Towards the South Pole translatesfirst-hand observation, nautical data, log-book entries, daily sextant readings, andwater-currents in order to discover, to “represent, for the first time,” Terra AustralisIncognita. As representation, discovery is the always provisional result of a practiceof a translation that is already underway. Yet as the “first time,” as the event of theappearance of the new, discovery interrupts the process of translation, causes it tostutter, to begin again, and altering its course, to continue. The difficulty withregards to the Rime, and perhaps more generally, lies therein that these two dimensionsare irrevocably intertwined, that they have no common origin, transcendental or other-wise, and that the possibility of the one demands the legibility of the other – in the sametext.

Mapping the Voyage

In 1817, Coleridge replaced the argument to the Rime, which he had already changedfor the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads, with an epigraph taken from ThomasBurnet. These changes mark a significant shift in the presentation of the Rime, froma nearly exclusively geographical description of the poem in the 1798 Argument, toan endorsement of the moral value of the Rime in the revised 1800 Argument, andfinally to the metaphysical speculation signaled by the Burnet epigraph. All threehead notes provide the reader with different maps of the poem: a physical geographyin the 1798 Argument, which charts the course of the ship; a moral geography in the1800 argument, where the killing of the albatross takes the place of the second legof ship’s voyage; and a cognitive geography in the Burnet epigraph, which speaks of“contemplat[ing], in the mind, as on a tablet, the image of a better and greaterworld.”11 Burnet’s epigraph’s distinctions between invisible and visible beings, aswell as its interest in the contemplation and interior composition of a “better” world,figure an implicit counter to Kant’s notion that the realm beyond the reach of experiencewas substantially empty. The passage echoes the practices of a cartographic traditionthat, as Alfred Hiatt has shown, dates back to the Middle Ages and fills in blankspaces on maps with “a mixture of fantasy, curiosity, mystery, and authority” (224).Hiatt argues that while medieval cartographers relied primarily on Greek and Romangeographical theories and histories to fill in and illustrate what lay beyond theknown world, from the fifteenth century onward cartographers increasingly relied oninformation returned from voyages of discovery, even though they continued to fillin blank spaces on the map – the interior of Africa, e.g., and the then fictional southerncontinent, “Terra Australis” – from an amalgam of travel narrative, conjecture, andmetaphysical speculation. In this context, Coleridge’s quotation of Burnet – particu-larly the mention that “the human mind has always desired the knowledge of thesethings, but never attained it . . . [; it] is helpful sometimes to contemplate in themind, as on a tablet, the image of a greater and better world” – suggests that theRime not only looks beyond the limits of the known world, as if across Kant’s“broad and stormy ocean,” but that the Rime itself figures as a map of that world.

While the Rime drew from a wide variety of sources, as Lowes demonstrated, themost influential one may well have been Captain George Shelvocke’s 1726 Voyagearound the World.12 The frontispiece to the book contained a map, unironically cap-tioned “A correct map of the world,” that differs quite a bit from the one we know,especially in the region of the Pacific (Figure 1). New Holland is connected to New

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Guinea by a land bridge and has no eastern boundary; Baja California is an island offthe coast of California; Alaska and Northern Canada, their coastlines breaking off, areuncharted; Antarctica doesn’t exist. In its mixture of hypothetical and exploratory cor-rectness, Shelvocke’s map leaves the unexplored territories – the “Terra Incognita” ofearly modern maps – blank. Earlier mapmakers had filled out these blank spaces on thebasis of conjecture and legend, but late eighteenth and early nineteenth century mapswere more “correct” in that they either left the unexplored literally blank or explicitlymarked it as “unknown.” Shelvocke’s map, although it treats some commonly heldassumptions as true (such as the supposed course of the Niger River), largelyfollows the latter practice, leaving blank spaces in accordance with the progress of dis-covery. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Pacific appears on Shelvocke’smap as the single, largest blank space on the earth, uncharted and largely unexplored –“a silent sea” indeed. Less than a half a century later, Shelvocke’s map was already out-dated. Captain Cook’s successive voyages into the Pacific had established the bound-aries of Australia, the existence of Terra Australis Incognita, or Antarctica, and theseparation of Alaska and Russia by the Bering Strait.13 The blank spaces on the maphad been filled in, turned into known territories, made into possessions. If we thinkof the blank spaces on the map as the white of an empty piece of paper, as if awaitingand inviting its inscription, we might also say that Cook’s voyages – and those ofothers like him – literally wrote those spaces out of and into existence. Discovery“worlds the world” in writing, and writing in turn discovers the world and makes itavailable to others to discover.14

If Cook’s legacy is one of the discovery of new lands and charting the limits of theendless expanse of water that enveloped the earth, then the Mariner’s voyage seems tobear little resemblance to those of Cook. Although his ship passes through the “land ofmist and snow” where ice-bergs dwarf the ship, the Mariner discovers no new lands:there is no landfall, not even a sighting of land. Yet, Cook’s discovery of “the greatsouthern continent,” and the Mariner’s voyage mirror each other in some significant

Figure 1. The map from the frontispiece of Shelvocke’s A voyage round the world by the wayof the great South Sea, perform’d in the years 1719, 20, 21, 22, in the Speedwell of London, of 24guns and 100 men, (under His Majesty’s Commission to cruize on the Spaniards in the late warwith the Spanish crown). (G420 .S53 1726). Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.


aspects, beginning with the circumstance that, like Coleridge’s Mariner, Cook did not“discover” Terra Incognita as much as he deduced its existence.

For his second voyage, Cook was given secret orders “to proceed to the southwardin order to make discovery of the continent [Terra Australis] until you discover it” andthen to explore the coast, observe the nature of the land and the “natives.”15 The orderswere never fulfilled. Cook, thwarted by the lack of supplies and pack-ice that “sopetered [the sea] that the land is thereby inaccessible,” did not even lay eyes onTerra Australis Incognita. He is often credited with its discovery because he inferredits existence from the irregular latitudinal distribution of icebergs and pack-ice, ofwhich he supposed the “great southern continent” to be the absent cause (2: 230).Cook’s reasoning proceeded negatively. “If no such land exists,” it would follow“that the cold ought to be everywhere nearly equal around the pole” and that conse-quently he “ought to see ice every where under the same parallel, or near it” (2:230). Since the contrary had been found to be the case, Cook concluded that thereought to be a “track of land near the pole which is the source of most of the ice,”and that “the greatest part of this southern continent must lie within the polar circle”(2: 230). Cook’s discovery of the existence of the southern continent takes place asan event of thinking in accordance with concepts that posit Terra Australis Incognitaas the “unknown something,” the absent cause and origin of the empirical phenomena– icebergs, currents, weather patterns – whose appearance he had mapped.

Having mapped what was possible and sailed as far as he dared in the great andstormy seas of the southern ocean, Cook stakes his claim that Terra Australis existedon its very inaccessibility to discovery. “No man will ever venture farther than Ihave done” and “the lands which may lie to the south will never be explored,” Cookwrote, nor would their actual discovery “have answered any end, or have been theleast use, either to navigation and geography, or indeed to any other science” (2:231). And yet this abandonment of actual discovery, even of its possibility, seamlesslyleads to its entirely imaginary event. Cook moves from describing the dangers of dis-covery to a description of a country that lies beyond the horizon of what he had experi-enced from the deck of his ship:

Thick fogs, snow storms, intense cold, and every other thing that can render navigationdangerous must be encountered; and these difficulties are greatly heightened, by the inex-pressibly horrid aspect of the country; a country doomed by Nature never once to feel thesun’s rays but to lie buried in everlasting snow and ice. The ports which may be on thecoast, are, in a manner, wholly filled up with frozen snow of vast thickness. (2: 231)

No landfall, not even a sighting of Terra Australis, and yet Cook gives a description ofprecisely what he hasn’t seen, and calls it “inexpressibly horrid.” The inexpressible ismost definitely not Terra Australis, but rather Cook’s idea of it, the both rational andfanciful figuration of an “unknown something” he imagines to have discovered inthe phenomenal appearance of a world that points back to and beyond itself. Cook enti-tles his book A Voyage Towards the South Pole, and – nomen est omen – his text itselfmoves toward that largest remaining blank part of the map. And then, after it hasreached its southernmost point, the text jumps back beyond that limit, and what itencounters there is too horrible, too savage, to even be worth being discovered:

If this imperfect account of the formation of these extraordinary floating islands of ice,which is written wholly from my own observations, does not convey some useful hintsto an abler pen, it will, however, convey some idea of the lands where they are formed.

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Lands doomed by Nature to perpetual frigidness; never to feel the warmth of the sun’srays; whose horrible and savage aspect I have not words to describe . . . If any oneshould have resolution [the name of Cook’s ship] and perseverance to clear up thispoint by proceeding farther than I have done, I shall not envy him the honour of the dis-covery; but I will be bold to say, that the world will not be benefited by it. (2: 241–42)

Cook discovers by inference, observing the ice islands, recording their locations andpatterns of appearance, logging the weather, and then deducing from these outwardsigns – contingent happenings beyond the ship – the existence of something he has“not words to describe” that is yet savage and horrid, “alien.” At the outer limit of theknown, language can both not apply to Terra Australis and proclaim its existence, as ifthere were something beyond the reach of words that nonetheless could be shown inlanguage. The “words” that would describe the “aspect” of the unknown more properlywill come from an other, “abler pen,” which, as Cook’s pun on the name of his ship (Res-olution) implies, would in turn have access to Terra Australis only by following the hints ofCook’s pen – that which is “written wholly from my own observations” – and the pathcharted out by the course of the Resolution’s voyage. The implication is clear: whatCook has “not words to describe” is nonetheless inscribed in his account, such that anyfurther discovery of Terra Australis Incognita will merely repeat, literally in otherwords, his figural discovery: even a landfall on the shores of Terra Australis, the “descrip-tion of its soil and animals,” would be but a translation of what Cook had already written,the event of whose discovery is prescribed as an event of reading: of Cook’s VoyageTowards the South Pole, as a literal following in the figural wake of Cook’s ship.

If Cook’s knowledge of extreme southern geography is grounded in the world ofempirical fact and based on the application of laws of cause and effect and the scientificaccumulation, mapping and translation of nautical and meteorological data, the Rimehas generally been read as taking place in an imagined, rather than real geography. Yetthe geography of the Rime is not entirely fantastical. Mapping the course of the Mariner’svoyage in the context of eighteenth-century discovery literature reveals that the Mariner’sdiscovery of the silent sea appears as a repetition of Cook’s “discovery” of Terra Incognita,as the crossing of an imaginary line that both requires and resists its later translations.

Superimposed on Shelvocke’s map, I have reconstructed the Mariner’s ship’s route,and marked the spots where central events of the poem take place (Figure 2). The shipleaves Britain, sails south through the Atlantic, crosses the equatorial line, and, drivenby “A wind and tempest strong / For days and weeks” (ll. 46–47), moves on towardsthe South Pole. The first circle marks the Mariner’s slaying of the albatross with hiscrossbow. The ship then sails north – “The sun came up upon the right” – aided by“a good south wind” (ll. 81; 69), how long we know not, until it reaches the equator,where it is becalmed. Somewhere in the interval – where we cannot tell – the shipand its crew discover the Pacific Ocean (gestured towards by the two parallel lines):“We were the first that ever burst / Into that silent Sea” (ll. 101–2). In the very nextstanza, but at quite a geographical remove from the presumed boundary to the silentsea, the ship is becalmed at the equator, “stuck, . . . / As idle as a painted ship /Upon a painted Ocean” (ll. 111–13). A dotted circle traces the ship’s languishing inthe doldrums, indicating that the ship, as if drawn magnetically back to the land ofice and snow, drifts imperceptibly southwards (later, the ship will have to sail northagain to reach the equator [ll. 327–90]). It is a period of inexpressible suffering: theMariner’s shipmates blame him and hang the albatross around his neck; there is theencounter with the spectre ship and the ensuing death of the entire crew who curse


him as they die followed by the “seven days and seven nights” the Mariner suffers inagony “Alone, alone, all, all alone / Alone on a wide wide sea” (ll. 224–25) whichcome to an end when he “blesses” the water snakes “unaware” (ll. 277–79). Theship begins to move north towards the equatorial line again, where it comes to ahalt, and “With a short uneasy motion – / Backwards and forwards half her length”(ll. 391–92) makes “a sudden bound” into a magical, spirit-aided voyage home, towhose route the Rime gives no clues. We might speculate that the voyage goes straightthrough China and Asia (or America, for that matter), or that the ship sails through theundiscovered Northwest Passage (a route Cook tried and failed to find on his lastvoyage in 1778 because of the northern ice-packs). It is also possible (but theMariner says the ship heads north) that the ship takes the conventional route takenby Shelvocke around the Cape of Good Hope.

The geographical glossing over and blurring of the Mariner’s return is peculiar for apoem that claims both in the 1798 and 1800 “Arguments” to be about “the manner inwhich the Ancient Mariner came back to his own country.” The manner of returninghome the Rime portrays is that of a passage through a geographical and temporallacuna, as if ship and Mariner passed through a vacuum – the Rime says “The air iscut away before, / And closes from behind” the ship (ll. 429–30). The possibility ofthis passage is the condition for the Mariner’s arrival on the (properly geographical)shores of his “own countree” (l. 472) and the telling of his tale. Miraculous as it isunmappable, the Mariner’s return voyage links the geographical discovery to hisaccount of it to the hermit by way of a translation – a carrying over, across orthrough a blank space on the earth.16

The ship emerges from this space itself translated, transformed into a figure of thespectre-bark. And then, having crossed the “harbor bar” (yet another line), its passagehome is interrupted as if by its own shipwreck, going down in a whirlpool just as thepilot’s boat with the “hermit good” arrives to guide it to its mooring place. If this is

Figure 2. The course of the Mariner’s voyage, superimposed on Shelvocke’s map [A voyageround the world by the way of the great South Sea, perform’d in the years 1719, 20, 21, 22, in theSpeedwell of London, of 24 guns and 100 men, (under His Majesty’s Commission to cruize onthe Spaniards in the late war with the Spanish crown). (G420 .S53 1726). Special Collections,University of Virginia Library.]

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the end of the ship’s voyage, it is also the beginning of the Mariner’s rescue, a rescue thatappears as a translation, as a passage from one vessel to another, for the Mariner “findshimself” in the pilot’s boat which ferries him to the shore of his country, where he entreatsthe hermit to shrive him. The hermit complies, the Mariner tells his tale – translates hisexperience, represents his discovery for the first time – and is then left “free.” But theMariner’s tale, like the translations that enabled it, remains incomplete, and hisfreedom is only ever temporary, leaving him to wander the earth in search of the manwho will, again for the first time, hear his tale. And this wandering, too, is a passageas if through a blank space: the Rime gives no account of it, and inasmuch as theMariner emerges with the beginning of the Rime and disappears at its end, we mightsay that the Rime itself emerges from that blank space, as if a testament to andrepresentation of it.

“We were the first”

The discovery of the “silent sea” is the only geographical discovery in the poem. It issimultaneously over- and underdetermined, and appears as a symptomatic point of con-densation: ostensibly the inaugural event of the historical sequence of all voyages intothe “silent sea,” it signals the beginning of the Mariner’s penance, locates his tale in thehistory of maritime exploration, and marks the Rime’s and the Mariner’s entry into anuninscribed space, as if into an invisible or noumenal world. Moreover, it also repeatsand reworks Cook’s “discovery” of Terra Australis Incognita, however ironically, andcomes to pass as the event of a translation.

The two stanzas that precede the discovery of the “silent sea” link that discovery tothe Mariner’s killing of the albatross, and parody from a distance the empirical pro-cedures of Cook’s discovery of Antarctica.

And I had done a hellish thing,And it would work ’em woe:

For all averr’d, I had killed the BirdThat made the Breeze to blow.

Nor dim ne red, like God’s own head,The glorious Sun uprist:

Then all averr’d, I had kill’d the BirdThat brought the fog and mist.

‘Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,That bring the fog and mist. (ll. 89–98)

Like Cook, who catalogs temperatures, sea currents, the location and number of iceislands in order to discover their source, the mariners too look to the phenomenalappearance of things beyond the ship – the wind and the fog and mist – except, ofcourse, that what the mariners are trying to establish is less the source of ice islandsthan the Mariner’s character. They act as if the weather patterns would reveal the Mar-iner’s morality, reading them as the effect of an absent cause: the slaying of the alba-tross. Like Cook’s “discovery” of Antarctica, their discovery would be an inferencerather than a matter of fact. Yet quite unlike Cook, the Mariner and his ship-matesdo cross the threshold of an actual discovery and they literally encounter the “horribleand savage aspects” of that which awaits the discoverer. But there is also another differ-ence. Cook’s account of his discovery, which translates the writing of others (the firstmate’s chart references, entries into various ship logs, etc.), utilizes the plural “we”


when it renders daily events – “we stood to South;” “what we had seen, was either agroup of islands or the continent” (Cook 230) – but as soon as Cook begins musing onwhat, or whether anything, had been discovered, he uses the singular “I,” e.g. when hewrites “I can be bold enough to say that no man will ever venture farther than I havedone” (242). The captain’s right to claim discovery was a commonplace, but in thecase of the Rime, where, as Stevenson has pointed out, the ship has no captain, the dis-covery of the silent sea is collective, the claim to being the “first” belonging to a plural“we:” “We were the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea” (ll. 101–2).17 The lines inwhich the mariners appear as exceptionally bad and superstitious discoverers (but dis-covers nonetheless), establish a pattern of inclusion and exclusion that the communal“we” that discovers the Pacific sublates: “They” first exclude the Mariner becausethe Mariner killed the bird that made the breeze to blow (even though it is stillblowing), and then “they” laud him for the slaying because the bird had brought thefog and mist (even though the bird appeared well after of the fog and mist). So insaying that “we were the first,” the Mariner performatively asserts his (re)integrationinto the community of men on the ship, making himself an “accomplice,” to use thegloss’s terminology, to his shipmates’ superstitions, just as the shipmates make them-selves “accomplices” to his crime when they justify it. Thus the discovery of the silentsea sutures two narratives onto each other – that of the ship’s voyage into the hithertounknown, and that of the Mariner’s character, which is also, but not only, a question ofthe moral valuation of his slaying the albatross.

The Rime represents the discovery of the silent sea in terms of these two narrativestrands. The event of discovery – be it that of the Mariner’s shipmates or that of thesilent sea – appears retroactively as the condition of possibility of their relation,which rearticulates the Mariner’s in- and exclusion from the discovering “we.” Butthe discovery is unmappable, occurring at a geographical point whose location disap-pears at the moment one would want to pinpoint it. The Mariner, in other words, can saythat and what “we” discovered, but he cannot say where that discovery happened.

The breezes blew, the white foam flew,The furrow follow’d free:

We were the first that ever burstInto that silent sea. (ll. 99–102)

The first two lines figure the motion of the ship cutting through the sea – albeit withoutthe literal presence of the ship, which is figured as the invisible node in or absentmediator of a causal chain it holds together.18 The latter two lines, by contrast,declare the occurrence – the mere having happened – of a past event: somewherealong the way, there was a discovery. The moment of discovery is figured as “bursting”through an (invisible) barrier, as a passage from one space into another, as the crossingof a threshold or of a virtual line. The two phrases are linked by a colon, so the secondphrase would seem to expand on, translate, or illustrate the first. But how is a “burstinginto” to represent a continuous line? Given that a line – a continuous extension of theship’s path cutting through the sea – appears as a series of points, all of which are alike– at every moment, the breeze was blowing, the foam was flying, the furrow was fol-lowing freely – the point at which the ship “bursts into that silent sea” disappears intothe sameness of the line. Discovery here occurs as casually as it is noted by the pasttense of the verb (“we were”), indistinguishable from the narrative temporality inwhich it is related. Somewhere, “we” might say, “we” discovered, and this somewherecould be anywhere on the ship’s path. The event of discovery remains phenomenally

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indistinguishable from the path of the ship, even as the Mariner proclaims its epistemo-logical and historical “firstness.”19

If the event of discovery is figured as the path of the ship, it is characterized by apeculiarly vacillating, doubled perspective. The Mariner says that the “furrow followedfree,” yet a furrow only appears to “follow” a ship when that ship, like the sublimityof Kant’s pyramids in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, is regarded from a particu-lar distance, such that its wake appears detached from the ship. From the deck of a ship,its furrow would seem to flow away from rather than follow the ship. Simultaneously in-and outside of the communal “we,” the Mariner is both on the ship “burst[ing] into thesilent sea” and beyond it, looking back on, indeed reading that “we” – himself, the crew,the ship – discovering. The relation of the ship and the Mariner appears as a giddy oscil-lation between two unlocatable points: the point at which the ship, the Mariner, and thecrew “burst” into the Pacific, and the point beyond the ship where that “bursting” ismatter-of-factly called “the first.” The gaze of the Mariner’s “we” traverses a spacethat contains, sublates, and collapses within it his own temporal distance to the discover-ing “we,” and in that movement incessantly translates the matter of fact of discovery intoits event, and the event of discovery into its matter of fact. Marked by the belatedness ofthe discovery’s translation, the vantage point of the “we” becomes indistinguishable fromthat of the text, inscribed in it as the very condition of possibility of discovery: “we werethe first” is a “zero figure,” absolutely literal, non-figurative, self-referential, a matter offact that designates the space of a literal translation, pointing to itself reading the ever-dis-appearing event of discovery in the flight of the figure of the ship.20 This space of trans-lation, suspended between two points (the one within, the other without the ship), toucheson the literality of a “we” that is also the “we” of reading. If the phrase “we were the first”is the matter of fact of discovery, its event is always also the multiple event of its reading.In this sense, the discovery of the silent sea comes to pass as a literary event that can belocated neither in the text of the Rime nor on any existing map, but rather traverses both asthe figural event of its translation.

Agony and Discovery

If the discovery of the silent sea establishes the poem’s engagement with the event ofdiscovery, then the Mariner’s shriving by the hermit figures the moment where discov-ery enters into representation and becomes, as it were, a matter of fact. The shrivingstands at the end of the Mariner’s voyage of discovery: it marks his return to theshores of his “own countree” (l. 603), and contains the tale’s first telling.21 Yet theRime does not tell us what the Mariner says, laconically noting only that the Marinerwas “forced to begin [his] tale” and then was left free. The closest account of the Mar-iner’s tale as he tells it to the hermit is “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the record-ing of a telling that is itself the “n-th” telling of this first telling, of which no account isavailable. The first telling, if there ever was one, is always in danger of becoming amere product of the reader’s – which is also to say, the critic’s – imagination.

In keeping with the impossibility of finding a first beginning to the poem, the Rimedoes not begin with the shriving, but rather with an account we “hear” from the pen ofanother. Moreover, this beginning is double, or rather: it begins twice, as if there weretwo stories to tell. The first line is justly famous: “It is an ancient Mariner” sets up aphantom reference – the Mariner is an “it,” a name before the name, the referent ofsomething that has always already happened or been said (compare Lipking, 614ff).There is more to be said about this “it,” to which we will return. Here, we should


remark that the Rime begins with a pointing gesture toward the Mariner, even if the gazeof the text – wary of his glittering eye? – looks past him. The Mariner’s tale begins a fewstanzas later, with the line “There was a ship” (l. 10). Again, “there” is a pointing gestureto a necessarily empty place, present only in its absence, as Hegel demonstrates in theopening sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit (59ff). If “there” is the always pluralplace of sublation in Hegel, in the Rime “there” points to a plurality of ships: the shipof the Mariner, the spectre-bark, and the pilot’s boat.22 (In the 1798 version of the tale,the Mariner has to say “ship” three times before the tale gets under way.) In saying“There was a ship,” the Mariner might be referring to the ghost ship, as most criticsbelieve; we could also take it as the Mariner’s ship, or the pilot’s boat. That it can beeither at once is part of the difficulty; in any case, his tale begins by pointing to an(absent) ship. The two beginnings figure two intertwined narrative strands of the Rime:that of Mariner (and his character) and that of the ship (and its voyage of discovery).

The hermit’s shriving of the Mariner marks a break or rupture in these two tales. Itseparates the Mariner’s voyage from sea to sea from his ensuing wanderings fromland to land. Having become a figure of the ship to whose course he had been subjected,without choice or a will of his own, the Mariner acquires a “strange power of speech,”imposing his will on others.23 The shriving also marks the point where the Mariner’s pro-pensity to misrecognition turns into a capacity for instant and certain recognition; beforethe shriving, the Mariner misrecognizes nearly everything he encounters: his recognitionof community (the “we” of discovery) turns into his ostracization from that communitywhen the albatross is hung around his neck and he is later cursed; the sailing ship on thehorizon promising salvation turns out to be a mysteriously propelled ghost-ship thatbrings death and agony. In contrast, afterwards he recognizes with infallible surety:“the moment that his face I see / I know the man that must hear me” (l. 622). And ifbefore the shriving the Mariner was, as Wordsworth put it, “continuously acted upon,”afterwards he acts upon others, buttonholing wedding guests, stunning them so thatthey will rise “sadder and wiser [men] / . . . the morrow morn” (ll. 656–57).

In being shriven, the Mariner tells his tale for the first time. It is a first narrative turnto or gaze back on his voyage, a moment that is repeated again and again, as if its veryrepetition were necessary to verify the tale. The shriving figures as the moment of rec-ognition when a second look makes available for the first time the matter of fact of dis-covery, when it is translated for an other.

“O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy Man!The Hermit cross’d his brow.

“Say quick,” quoth he, “I bid thee say –“What manner man art thou?

Forthwith this frame of mine was wrench’dWith a woful agony,

Which forc’d me begin my taleAnd then it left me free. (ll. 607–14)

The shriving is preceded by a scene of failed recognition, in which the hermit appears likeRousseau’s natural man, unable to recognize the being before him. The hermit’s reply tothe Mariner’s plea calls into question not only the Mariner’s identity, but also his belong-ing to the species man at all. “Say quick,” the hermit blurts out, and then, as if becomingaware of the office of confessor he is to fulfill, reformulates what sounds like an injunc-tion to the Mariner to literally say that he is “quick,” i.e. not dead, as a bidding. But the

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hermit’s uncertainty resounds in the question he puts to the Mariner. The prosodic hesita-tion the apposition “quoth he” marked resounds in “What manner man art thou,” turningit into the homophonic “What man, or man, art thou?” This paranomastic splitting makesthe hermit ask twice as much as he does, turning a question about the Mariner’s characterinto one about his being man, as if he were asking “What manner of man art thou or artthou man at all?” It is an unanswerable question (the gloss notes that the question makesthe “penance of life fall on him,” as if life itself only could answer the question).24 In thisway, echoing across the silent sea and across distant continents, the hermit’s questioningrepeats the pattern of social inclusion and exclusion that constituted the communal “we”of the discovery of the silent sea.

If the hermit’s query reopens the social wound the discovery of the Pacific hadsutured, the Mariner’s response is not, at first, verbal – his “frame” is wrenched byan “agony” that forces him to begin his tale. This “agony” points to a discovery (ofthe silent sea), but it also points to a being discovered (in the silent sea). “Agony”appears in a single other passage in the poem – when, in the aftermath of the encounterwith the spectre-ship and the ensuing death of his crew-mates, he had been left “Alone,alone, all all alone / On the wide, wide sea,” his “soul in agony” (ll. 224–27). Thehermit’s question thus recalls that “there was [another] ship” – a ship the Mariner mis-recognizes, a ship whose crew discovers him (and his life in death) as if by chance (andin advance), and then, having separated him out of his community, darts off as suddenlyas it came – much as the agony that wrenches his frame forces the Mariner to discoverhis self to another man, and then leaves him free.

The encounter of the two ships repeats the figural structure of the discovery of thesilent sea, where the Mariner had been both on and off the ship, looking back at it burst-ing into the Pacific. When he is becalmed in the doldrums, Life-in-Death and her “flesh-less Pheere” on the spectre-ship take the very same position as the Mariner’s “we”claiming the discovery of the silent sea, as if they were playing dice from the placeof utterance beyond the Mariner’s ship from where it had been possible to say “wewere the first.” But here, the Mariner is discovered from an other ship, and thatbeing-discovered literally deprives him of community, refiguring his specular in- andexclusion from that community as a life-in-death, the “ghastly figure” of which hewill become in time to meet the pilot’s boat. The Mariner’s deprivation is hencedouble, both of man and of character: when the spectre-bark appears, his shipmatesare killed while he is arbitrarily singled to live a life in death, and as they die, eachcurses him. If their last judgment of him had closed the sequence of his in- and exclu-sions by the community of man on the ship and so precipitated the agony of his soul, thereturn of the agony simultaneously denies closure to and terminates the sequence ofevents from which the Mariner had emerged a member of community – as a“manner man,” one of the “we” who had discovered – retrospectively disarticulatingan historical series, the terrors of which the Mariner can neither evade or overcome.

The Mariner’s agony thus points both to a discovery (of the silent sea) and to a beingdiscovered (in the silent sea), both to his reintegration into community and his beingexcised from it. That the agony is both the translation and the translator of the Mariner’stale,25 and that we cannot tell whether the one or the other – the Mariner’s tale of dis-covery or the agony of having been discovered discovering – leaves him free, suggestsa kind of structural reciprocity or isomorphism, as if the two narrative strands collapsedinto or touched each other, and so made it possible to discover the discovery, as it were:in discovering, the Mariner is reintegrated into community, whereas in being discov-ered, he is excised from it; both the discovery of the silent sea and the encounter


with the specter-bark enjoin discovery with the hermit’s question; the ship appears as arepetition (a discovering ship) and as a prefiguration of the Mariner (who is returnedhome as a skeletal, ghastly figure). If the figure of the ship in general enables discovery,and if discovery ends up being a question of being a “manner man” or being man at all,then the ship bursting into the silent sea marks the beginning of a process of agony inwhich an other ship becomes its agonistic supplement, both enabling discovery andundoing the reciprocity of the knowledge it promises by the figural displacement ininaugurates. In the Rime, the serial appearance of ships, each of which promises torescue the Mariner from the vicissitudes of discovery, comes to end with the appearanceof pilot’s boat. At that very moment, after the Mariner’s ship has crossed another line,the “harbor bar” (l. 473) – when the pilot’s boat bearing the “hermit good” (l. 509)appears promising rescue, as if to ensure the reciprocal stability of discovery, as ifthe Mariner could arrive at the knowledge of his own experience, as if he couldunite character and man by his difference from “death in life” – the voyage is inter-rupted, the ship, which is now but the spitting image of the spectre-bark, the veryfigure of the Mariner’s agony, sinks, and the Mariner is saved.

Translation: Turning A Figure Into a TropeIn the epistemo-critical prologue of his Trauerspiel book, Walter Benjamin dis-tinguishes between origin and genesis by means of an image that in the Rime figuresthe end of the Mariner’s voyage:

Origin [Ursprung], although an entirely historical category, nevertheless has nothing incommon with genesis [Entstehung]. Origin is not meant to describe the coming intobeing of an existent, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becom-ing and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and it pulls into itsrhythm the material involved in the process of genesis. That which is original is neverrevealed in the naked and the manifest of the factual; its rhythm is apparent only to adual insight . . . There takes place in every originary phenomenon a determination ofthe form in which an idea will constantly confront the historical world, until it [theform] is revealed fulfilled, in the totality of its history. Origin is not, therefore, discoveredby the examination of actual findings, but it is related to their pre- and posthistory [Vor-und Nachgeschichte]. (Ursprung 1: 226; Origin 45–46; emphasis added)

The eddy figures a beginning, but one that, as the German Ursprung suggests, is alwaysdouble: an archaic (Ur-) leap that is also a break (the two senses of Sprung) – a jumpinto time from beyond time, and so one that has no existing beginning. In the Rime, wefind the figure of the eddy at the moment when the Mariner, having “crossed the harborbar” on the ship, is rescued by the pilot’s boat. The Mariner’s ship has decayed into afigure of the spectre-bark, with the Mariner as the “nightmare Life-in-Death” and thedead crew as her “fleshless pheere,” “Death.”26 The hermit exclaims “[the ship] hatha fiendish look,” “The planks look warped, and see those sails / How thin and serethey are,” and compares it to a “skeleton,” evoking the “Ribs [of the spectre bark]through which the Sun / Did peer as through a grate” (ll. 571, 562–63). In a thunderousrumble of sound that “split the bay,” the ship sinks “like lead” into the sea:

The ship went down like lead.

Stunn’d by that loud and dreadful sound,Which sky and ocean smote,

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Like one that hath been seven days drown’dMy body lay afloat;

But swift as dreams, myself I foundWithin the Pilot’s boat

Upon the whirl, where sank the ship,The boat spun round and round;

And all was still, save that the hillWas telling of the sound. (ll. 583–92)

The passage from the ship to the pilot’s boat allegorizes the Mariner’s voyage of discov-ery and his supernatural, spirit-aided return home: the sinking of the ship into the sea refi-gures the discovery of the Pacific – the point when the ship “burst into that silent sea”only to later emerge as a skeleton of its former self. After the sinking, the Marinertakes the place of the ship, lying afloat on the water “Like one that hath been sevendays drowned” a line that recalls his days spent “Alone, Alone, all, all alone” in agonyafter he is cursed by his crewmates: “Seven days, seven nights I saw that curse, / Andyet I could not die” (ll. 253–54). His rescue arrives “swift as dreams,” just as the ship“swiftly, swiftly flew” back to his own country (l. 587; l. 465). But this return is momen-tarily suspended, interrupted a second time, when the pilot boat is pulled into the eddy. Asif going backwards in time even as the narrative moves forward, the image recalls theearlier scene of the albatross circling the Mariner’s ship:27

And round and round it flew:The Ice did split with a Thunder-fit;

And the Helmsman steer’d us through. (ll. 66–68)

The boat takes the place of the albatross circling the Mariner’s ship, beneath whichthe ship sinks into the silent moonlit bay, much as the dead albatross “sank / like leadinto the sea” when he blesses the water snakes. Thus the albatross appears doubly: thepilot’s boat figures the bird as alive, while the ship figures it as dead. We might say withBenjamin that the eddy “swallows the material involved in the process of genesis,”where the material is nothing other than the narrative that extends between theMariner killing the albatross and his being freed from the burden of that killing. Theeddy, in other words, also figures for us the Mariner’s becoming free of his guilt.Hence the scene concerns neither the killing of the albatross nor its disappearanceinto the sea as much as it does its resurrection, for it is the boat as the trope of thelive albatross that survives while the ship and its dead crew sink. As if endorsingthis spectral resurrection, the gloss laconically notes “The ancient Mariner is savedin the Pilot’s boat,” transmuting the resurrection of the bird into the salvation of theMariner from his life-in-death. Yet this restorative reading is also imperfect and incom-plete, for it at the same time tropes the pilot’s boat as the substitute of the ship, as if theMariner was unable to separate himself from his prior existence, as if he would have toonce again rid himself of the figural albatross hanging on his neck.

Thus, it is hardly a surprise that the Mariner’s ensuing mini-voyage – the eddy’sNachgeschichte – to the shore repeats in condensed metaphorical fashion the previousvoyage – with the small but crucial difference that the hermit occupies the place of theMariner (albeit an improved version, for unlike the Mariner, he is able to pray), whilethe Mariner appears in the role of the “Nightmare Life in Death,” wrecking havoc on theboat: the Mariner “move[s] his lips” and the “Pilot [falls] down into a fit,” while thePilot’s boy, “who doth crazy go,” identifies him as the devil.


What emerges from the eddy simultaneously reflects and reverses the precedingvoyage of discovery. This emergence is not a genesis, but rather stands precisely asthe figure that separates the two beginnings in the poem, that extends between “therewas a ship” and “it is an ancient Mariner.” In this abysall structuration of beginnings,Coleridge’s Rime suggests that the connection between the two is always figural. YetBenjamin also reminds us – as does the structure of the Rime – that if we are to dis-cover their origin, they have to be dissociated from the first moment of their occurrence,precisely because they always pre-figure what is yet to come. “Origin,” Benjaminwrites, “is related to their pre- and post-history [Vor- und Nachgeschichte],” to thehistory out of which the event emerges, and the history of the disappearance of thatevent. What makes the Rime perplexing is that the pervasive repetition of figurestempts one to turn the figure into a trope. If the eddy is the central figure of discoveryin the Rime, a moment of suspension that leads to yet another turn of the tale, we mightsay that inasmuch as the image is that of a turn turning on a turn, discovery in the Rimeis a constant, but never completed, “turning into trope.” In this multiplicity of turns – aturning into a figure of transformation, an indistinguishable point at which a transform-ation becomes a figure of itself, the moment at which a circuitous path (e.g. the Mar-iner’s voyage of discovery) turns into an outline of something else, where onenarrative turns into another, as if by a piercing, much as the Mariner’s arrow pierced“the bird that lov’d the man / Who shot him with his bow” (ll. 418–19) or the ship“burst into that silent sea,” – we, like the Mariner, are always on the verge of beingdragged into an endless search for beginnings, “from which [we] can never escapeand yet also never bring to an end,” to quote Kant. And it is this predicament, theRime seems to suggest, that is the very condition of possibility, not only of theRime, but also of literary criticism.

The Rime’s engagement with discovery as always leading to a crisis of originemblematizes the romantic event tout court – the conception of the critical act, theact of critique, as the origin of writing or the production of literature.28 Indeed, theRime figures its own beginnings as the absence of the poem: all the Rime tells us isthat the Mariner tells his tale in response to the hermit, who figures the constitutive, sup-plementary role of criticism. I interpret the hermit’s question as the corollary of theKantian question that animated Romanticism: “who or what is man?” If for Kant,the question was famously unanswerable, Romanticism sought to fill “the hiatus atthe heart of the subject” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 32) by means of the literary pres-entation of the subject’s freedom. To shrive, as Cavell points out, is not only to hearconfession, but also to impose, prescribe – “to write (in advance)” (62) – a particularkind of penance or self-critique for the Mariner.29 “Shriving” blurs the boundariesbetween reading (hearing confession) and writing (the prescription of penance),placing them alongside each other much in the same way as Jena Romanticism con-ceived of the critical act as being both first and second, as “blurring the boundariesbetween the primary and secondary text, author and reader, and the temporality ofprior (or past) and present” (Bernstein 846). The Mariner’s tale would then amountto the self-reflective writing of criticism, or “literature as the production of its owntheory” (12).

Reading the “it” in “and then it left me free” as referring equivocally to both theagony and the tale, and taking the meter’s emphasis on “then . . . left . . . free” to indicatethat the agony and the tale in their leaving the Mariner’s body themselves also becomefree, figures “it” as a sort of absolute freedom. The Mariner is freed from the agony,itself free, freed from the tale, itself free, freed even from the telling, which was,

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however, quite unfree. That the freedom brought about by the “it” translates into thefreedom of all that is “it” figures “it” as a translation that leaves the Mariner free: theagony forces the Mariner to begin his tale, and “then,” translated in and by the tale,“it” leaves the Mariner, “free.” An interrupted translation, brought to a prematureend, “it” is nevertheless complete in its incompletion: complete in that the Mariner isleft free, incomplete in that the Mariner is bereft of the very “it” that set him free.

As a figure of the Mariner’s freedom from agony and the tale, “it” figures the trans-lation of the two narrative strands of the Rime. Determined by the mostly vagrant,unchartable trajectory of that ship, the Mariner’s voyage ends with a step ontoanother “ship” (albeit one better called a boat) – an ending that is not one becausethe Mariner does not in fact return home; an ending that is the beginning of a subjectionto an agony that “returns . . . at an uncertain hour” (ll. 581–82) and can only be alle-viated by beginning, again, with a ship. If this ending is an ending, it is the endingof “the ship,” not of the Mariner; an ending of a beginning that, as it turns out, willnever end.

The ship went down like lead. . .Like one that hath been seven days drowned

My body lay afloatBut swift as dreams, myself I found

Within the pilot’s boat (ll. 582; 585–89)

The Mariner finds himself translated, carried over, between two ships. His passage,“swift as dreams,” echoes the ship’s fantastic voyage home – “swiftly, swiftly flewthe ship” (l. 465) – and is troped as a passage of life through death: suspendedbetween the ships, he is like one “seven days drowned.” As translation, this passagepoints backwards, not forwards either in time or in the text, as if it could not yetproduce what it would discover. “Like one seven days drowned” recalls the “sevendays, seven nights” the Mariner’s soul is “in agony” on the becalmed ship (ll. 253;224–27). The Mariner’s release from the curse and agony is figured as a movementonto a ship that in turn opens onto a moment of freedom:

Beyond the shadow of the shipI watch’d the water-snakes:

They mov’d in tracks of shining white;And when they rear’d, the elfish light

Fell off in hoary flakes.

Within the shadow of the shipI watched their rich attire:

Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,They coiled and swam; and every track

Was a flash of golden fire. (ll. 264–73)

The movement from beyond to within the shadow of the ship pre-figures his beingcarried over from the ship to the boat, and likewise tropes the passing of death: the“blue, glossy green, and velvet black” of the water snakes are the colors of Death inthe 1798 version of the poem, whose bones are “Jet-black and bare, save where withrust / . . . / They’re patched with purple and green” (ll. 183–85). The Mariner’s recog-nition of the water snakes’ beauty repeats the encounter with the ambiguously sexedspectre-bark that brought death to his shipmates and a life of inexpressible guilt to


him – with the small but important difference that the Mariner’s being discovered hereappears translated into the recognition of an unspeakable beauty that figures his being“left free”:

O happy living things! no tongueTheir beauty might declare:

A spring of love gusht from my heart,And I bless’d them unaware!

Sure my kind saint took pity on me,And I bless’d them unaware.

The self-same moment I could prayAnd from my neck so free

The Albatross fell off, and sankLike lead into the sea. (ll. 274–83; my emphasis)

The Mariner’s spontaneously blessing the water snakes “unaware” appears as theimmediate cause of his being left free, of the burden of the albatross as well as ofhis shipmates’ curse. Most commentators read this scene as the Mariner becomingfree of his guilt for killing of the Albatross, but the literal Gestalt – the outline or typo-graphical shape of the stanzas – repeats and recalls a quite different scene: the Mari-ner’s discovery of the silent sea. Like the blessing of the water snakes, these stanzaspoint to a moment of recognition, albeit one of a different order:

Ne dim ne red, like God’s own head,The glorious Sun uprist :

Then all averr’d, I had kill’d the BirdThat brought the fog and mist.

’Twas right, said they, such birds to slayThat bring the fog and mist.

The breezes blew, the white foam flewThe furrow follow’d free:

We were the first that ever burstInto that silent sea. (93–102; my emphasis)

The homology between this passage and the blessing of the water snakes is offset by thecontrariety of their content. If there is translation involved here, it is not one in terms ofmovement between ships, but a unidirectional movement into a silent and unknown sea.It is paralleled by the crew’s (naıve critics?) reading the breezes, as if their effects trans-lated into a judgment of the Mariner’s slaying of the albatross, which is as much a criti-cal misrecognition as is the claim that the “furrow follow’d free:” the Mariner’sfreedom from guilt is as illusory as the furrow’s freedom from the ship. Unlike the bles-sing of the water snakes, the lines do not open up onto a moment of freedom, but onto adiscovery. One could draw the parallel between the albatross and the mariners, both ofwhom move “into the sea,” marking difference in the ways in which that movementoccurs: a “sinking” in the former case, a “bursting” in the latter. One could then associ-ate the Mariner with the albatross and the curse laid upon him by his shipmates, or onemight point out that the discovery of the Pacific is as much of a misrecognition as is themariners’ erroneous moral judgment. One could – and as literary critics, that is what weare to do. Yet precisely this association reaffirms the discovery of the Pacific, and notthe slaying of the albatross, as the point where the line from the agony of the shriving, inwhich the Rime finds its belated beginning, disappears. In its figural referral through the

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text, the communal, plural event of discovery marks the outer limit to which one canread. The Rime fuses the two strands of the hermit’s question – “What manner manart thou?” – by staging their translation as a discovery: the question of the Mariner’scharacter is taken up by his shipmates and ends in the confirmation of his belongingto the species “man” as one of the “we” who discover. The discovery of the Pacificemerges as the impossible figure of translation the Mariner is returned to “at an uncer-tain hour,” whose impossibility in turn discovers the Mariner as agony, and which,translated into the tale, leaves him free. In this way, “it” is the discovery of thePacific – unlocatable and unmappable but in the terms of the Rime itself – thatleaves the Mariner free.

AcknowledgmentsThe present essay has benefitted greatly from the suggestions of others. I would like to particu-larly thank Jacques Lezra, Sara Guyer, Terry Kelley, Jen Hill, and Keja Valens for their com-ments on the various early drafts of the essay, as well as the two anonymous reviewers of thepiece.

Notes1. At least since Warren’s reading, the Rime has functioned as the legitimatizing vehicle for

critical claims about Romanticism and the romantic aesthetic, its value, meaning and con-temporary relevance. Compare Warren, Christensen, H. O. Brown, Perkins.

2. On the influence of Romanticism’s conception of literature as containing its own criticism,cf. Susan Bernstein, who writes that the point has been made so often as to be “well worn”(834). In her excellent introduction to Romanticism, Cynthia Chase writes that “what arestill the most widely-held current assumptions about literature – such as the idea of‘organic form’ and the inseparability of form and content, and the conception of goodpoetry as the fusion of thought and feeling – derive . . . from romantic texts” (1).

The most influential account of this aspect of the romantic project is Lacoue-Labarthe andNancy’s The Literary Absolute, in which they show how the overturning and reversal ofKant was a philosophical rejection of the Kantian bargain by which knowledge of theworld was obtained at the price of ceding knowledge of the thing in itself (33). In asimilar vein (although following a philosophical trajectory largely prescribed by Schelling),Coleridge wrote in the Biographia Literaria, “I could never believe, it was possible for[Kant] to have meant no more by his Noumenon, or Thing in Itself, than his mere wordsexpress” (1: 155; original emphasis). If Kant insisted one could secure truth only bygiving up any pretension to knowing its being, Coleridge repeatedly insisted that “Truthis the correlative of Being” and that they were “identical and co-inherent” in the act ofknowledge – the absolute “I AM,” the “common principle of being and of knowing”which the promised deduction of the imagination was to “discover” (Biographia 1: 142–43; 281n2; 299).

For responses to the broad theoretical and historical claims of The Literary Absolute, seeGasche, Newmark, Bernstein, Critchley (99–161), Redfield, and N. Brown.

3. Of all the readings of the Rime I am aware of, only Stanley Cavell’s in In Quest of the Ordin-ary takes up the Rime directly in relation to Coleridge’s grappling with Kant’s critical phil-osophy. Cavell interprets Coleridge’s rejection of the Kantian bargain by which theknowledge of the world is gained at the price of ceding knowledge of the thing in itselfalso to be a rejection of the world as it is made by Kant’s faculty of the Understanding.Thus become merely reflective, the world is dead rather than alive. If it is this predicament– a predicament similar to that which Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy locate at the center ofJena Romanticism – that the writing of what Coleridge calls “genuine poetry” is to over-come, then, Cavell writes, “the calling to poetry is to give the world back, to bring itback, as to life” (45). Such an overcoming and call to poetry, this paper suggests, isstaked on and mediated by discovery.


4. Jerome McGann’s “The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner” similarly assumes the Rime as anallegory of literary criticism, but locates it in Coleridge’s exegetical High Church Tradition.

5. Cf. McGann, whose historical schema of the redaction, mediation and translation of theMariner’s original tale I refer to in the following discussion, albeit with the differencethat while McGann insists on the singular denominations of the character he names – asif there were one minstrel, a single editor – I use the plural to suggest a less controlledmode of (however fictional) dissemination.

6. Acknowledging Empson’s work, J. R. Ebbatson makes the connection explicit: “The rightstarting-point for an interpretation of The Ancient Mariner,” he writes, “lies in a return toLivingston Lowes’ great study” and “the perspicuity [of its] emphasis upon The AncientMariner as a supreme crystallization of the spirit of maritime expansion” (175). Thethemes of maritime expansion and discovery are notably absent from readings of theRime in the new critical tradition, as well in those informed by deconstruction and psycho-analytic approaches. All of these take the killing of the albatross as the pivotal event of theRime, with the notable exception of Susan Eilenberg, whose chapter “Voice and Ventrilo-quy in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’” in Strange Power of Speech focuses on the poli-tics of writing and the (non-) attributions of authorship that traverse the poem. Possibly themost influential reading of the Rime, Robert Penn Warren’s canonical “A Poem of PureImagination,” casts the killing of the albatross as “the original crime against the sacramentalconception of the universe” that is atoned for by “the poetic imagination [which] appears inthe poem in a regenerative and healing capacity,” and which provides aesthetic access to themoral law (27). In a similar vein, Boulger argues that “before the Mariner can accept faith,repentance, and a true sense of the spiritual order behind the phenomena or objects, he mustbe frightened out of the easy, vulgar, and commonplace assurance of the ‘reality’ of things”(16). These readings implicitly invoke a sacrificial economy: the albatross (often figured as aChrist figure) is sacrificed, and so sets the stage for the later blessing of the water snakes andthe final covenant of love between God, man and animals. More recent interpretations of thepoem (e.g. by Ebbatson, Keane, Kitson, and Maniquis) have read the Rime as an engage-ment with the French Revolution and British politics.

7. See Empson [“Ancient Mariner”], Ebbatson, Watkins, McKusick, Keane, Stevenson,Kitson, Bewell, Modiano, Lamb, Lee, Moss, Murphy, Rubinstein, and Ware.

8. For yellow fever, see Lee; for “scurvy,” Lamb; for slavery and colonial expansion, Ebbat-son, Empson, and Ware; for the French Revolution, Kitson; Keane reads the Rime as a nego-tiation of the political imbrications of both slavery and the French Revolution.

The methodological assumptions of historicism – that discovery can be discovered, as itwere – entail an implicit and often selective reduction of the figurative and literal meaningof the Rime to a narrowly contextualized referentiality, as Thomas Pfau has argued in “ThePhilosophy of Shipwreck: Gnosticism, Skepticism, and Coleridge’s Catastrophic Moder-nity.” Pfau examines new historicism’s “largely unexamined ideological commitment” toa “paradigm of knowledge as the institutional synthesis of so much impersonal, specialized,and dissociated information” in the context, and as symptom, of modernity’s “catastrophic. . . espousing [of] a means/end model of rationality as the sole way of being in the world”(955, 990, 980).

9. See note 2, above.10. “[T]he possibility of a thing can never be proved merely through the non-contradictoriness

of a concept of it, but only by vouching for it with an intuition corresponding to thisconcept” (Kant 361). The possibility of discovery – the extension of the understandingbeyond the land of truth – therefore turns on the possibility of a purely intellectual intuition(an intuition other than a sensible one). Hence the problem: All concepts depend on theexistence of the logical form of a concept of thinking and on the possibility of giving theconcept an object to which it is to be related (356). Kant grants that pure intellectual intui-tions are possible a priori as the mere form of empirical intuitions, but even these require anempirical intuition – data for possible experience – to have any objective validity; withoutsuch data, they would be a mere play of the imagination. What is necessary, in other words,is “for one to make an abstract concept sensible, i.e., to display the object that corresponds toit [the pure or intellectual intuition] in [empirical] intuition, since without this the conceptwould remain . . . without significance” (356). While mathematics accomplishes this task byproducing figures (Gestalt), other disciplines, particularly discursive ones such as

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philosophy, cannot follow suit since discursive figures operate according to rules thatexceed and disfigure those of the represented concepts. Yet despite this prohibition, andas Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy point out, Romanticism sought to make intellectual intui-tions available precisely through such an impossible mathesis (111).

11. All quotations the Rime are taken from Martin Wallen’s edition, Coleridge’s AncientMariner: An Experimental Edition of Texts and Revisions 1798–1828. Unless otherwisenoted, the quotations are from the 1798 edition of the poem.

12. Wordsworth had been reading Shelvocke’s Voyage “a day or two before” he and Coleridgecame up with the plan for the Ancient Mariner in November 1797, and Wordsworth culledfrom it the pivotal act the Rime would turn on: the killing of the albatross. George Souleargues that Coleridge almost certainly also read the book (it was in Wordsworth’slibrary) and points to a number of other details (the color of the water snakes, the “slimythings [that] did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea” [ll. 121–22]) Coleridge borrowedfrom the account, including, grosso modo, the ship’s route (287–88).

13. An avid reader of adventure stories and tales of the unknown, Coleridge had read bothCaptain Cook’s Voyage into the Pacific Ocean (1784) and the earlier Voyage Toward theSouth Pole (1777).

14. Cf., e.g., Gayatri Spivak, who describes such writing as an insistent trope of the imperialproject: the “worlding of a world on a supposedly uninscribed territory . . . is also atexting, textualising, a making into art, a making into the object to be understood” (1).Irwin similarly aligns unexplored white space with the space of writing and inscription:“It is writing, then, that constitutes the originality of the first man to enter an unknownregion, whether the writing is . . . a journal of the expedition brought back to civilizationor a narrative written after the explorer’s return” (70–71).

15. Cook’s orders were secret, and he only paraphrased them in his account of the voyage. Thefull extent of the orders, from which the quotation stems, only became known with theirpublication in the Navy Records Society’s Naval Miscellanies (Perrin 343–45).

16. The gloss’s reference to “the invisible habits of the element” links this nautical and textualpassage to Burnet’s “image of a greater and better world” contemplated “as on a tablet” inthe mind – an invisible mapping indeed.

In his detailed reading of the Mariner’s journey home, Sitterson notes the “critical per-plexity” both “over parts five and six of the poem” and over its “Neoplatonic machinery,”pointing out that very few critics maintain the passage is essential to the symbolic coherenceof the poem (17). He argues that “the machinery is functional but not interpretable” (n25),concluding that “the inaccessibility of [its] meaning to human understanding . . . is an inte-gral part of [the Rime’s] meaning” that points to “a fundamental mystery at the heart ofhuman knowledge” This mystery is perhaps geographical rather than human, inasmuchas it involves the possibility of returning knowledge home at all.

17. Stevenson does not refer to the discovery of the silent sea, but notes that the Mariner’s ship-mates would have, were the Mariner captain, been charged with mutiny when they first con-demned and then absolve him. The Mariner stands in for this power-vacuum, writesStevenson, and “is the paradox of a mutinous putative captain, a self-willed lost leader”whose slaying of the albatross makes him a “psycho-sexual” emblem of “Revolution,” “anew kind of leader” (13).

18. Put simply, the chain runs “wind – ship – foam – ship – furrow.” The wind blows on theship, propelling it forward so that the foam flies as it plows through the sea, and the furrowfollows free.

19. If the Mariner were the first to enter the Pacific, the discovery would predate Magellan’s1519–1522 voyage around the world. But there is no record of such a voyage, clearly,which makes its temporal location merely “before,” in an unreachable anteriority to Magel-lan and, ultimately, to any dating scheme. Geographically, the circumstance that the ship hasbeen sailing northward from the land of ice for at least a number of days and that the dis-covery of the Pacific is immediately followed by the becalming of the ship at the equator atbest allows the location of the discovery “somewhere” between the Antarctic ice and theequator. The declaration “we were the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea” takes onthe characteristics of a fiat, an act that asserts its own truth without accounting for itswhere and when. Even if we were to suppose that the Mariner was aware that he was dis-covering the Pacific (which one can), the Rime does not allow for the location of the where


and when of its discovery. The self-reflexivity of the two lines’ speech-act apodicticallyposits its own truth.

20. I take the term “zero figure” form Gerard Genette’s Figures of Literary Discourse, where herelates the term to the “phenomenon of the zero degree, in which an absence of signifierclearly designates a known signified; [it] is the infallible mark of the existence of asystem” (47–48). Here the system in force would be that of (maritime) discovery; I usethe term to designate the absence of figure in the stanza. “Figure,” Genette writes, “disap-pears only when the present signifier is literalized by an anti-rhetorical or terrorist con-science, . . . and when the absent signifier remains impossible to find” (50). In the linesdiscussed above, the absent signifier is the ship, the literalized one “we were the first.”

21. Eilenberg argues that “there was never a first time the Mariner recited his ‘Rime,’” becausethe tale was “from the outset . . . a repetition – of the experience itself . . ., of the words inwhich he retells it, and of other words, with which Coleridge and Wordsworth had beentelling or trying to tell tales during the last half-dozen years” (43). I would add that theMariner himself never recited the Rime: the balladeer’s recitation of the Rime tells us thatthe Mariner is “forced to begin [his] tale.”

22. For Hegel deictics such as “now,” “here,” or “this” – and so, also, “there” – point to asomething that has been, and that as such is not, but which having been, is nevertheless dia-lectically sublated [aufgehoben] in the deictic as “something that is reflected into itself, or asimple entity which, in its otherness, remains what it is: a Now [There] which is an absoluteplurality of Nows [Theres]” (64).

23. The ship decays into a skeleton, and the Mariner turns into a “ribbed” skeletal shape of hisformer self. As if anticipating later historicist readings of the Mariner as an agent of conta-gion (in, e.g. Bewell and Lee, respectively), Susan Eilenberg sums up this figural tendencyin the formula “[i]n the Rime you become what you meet,” arguing that “[t]his principle dic-tates the poem’s structure and plot” (52). My paper follows Eilenberg’s perceptiveemphases of the Mariner’s various metamorphoses.

24. Stanley Cavell similarly reads the gloss as a response to the hermit’s question (62).25. The Rime does not indicate whether or when the Mariner finishes his tale, only that the

agony forces its beginning, and that he is “then left free” by an “it” – an “it” that mightbe either the tale or the agony, or both. The indeterminate ending of this first telling ofthe tale leaves the relation of the Rime’s two narrative strands – that of the (two) ship’svoyage(s) of discovery and of the “manner man” the Mariner is – in abeyance. Insofarthe onset of the agony precipitates the telling of the Mariner’s tale and its departurefigures its (arbitrary) abruption, the agony would is coextensive in time with the tellingof the tale,

26. This point has been made by numerous critics, most eloquently by Eilenberg (52ff).27. Eilenberg observes that “both ships together thus reenact in sinister fashion the scenes in

which the playful albatross first comes across the frozen ship” (53), but she does notdevelop the implications of this figural repetition, nor does she link the scene to the Mari-ner’s becoming free of the albatross as he blesses the water snakes.

28. Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy and Bernstein.29. The OED gives “shrive” as an Old English term that means “to impose penance upon a

person; hence, to administer absolution to; to hear the confession of.” Its etymologicalroot is the Latin scribere, to write, such that the imposition appears as the prescription ofpenance. Cavell reads the Hermit’s role vis-a-vis that of the Mariner as the poet maudite,casting writing as a “kind of self-redemption, which fits with the fact that the Hermit’s pre-scription is of a confession the very telling of which constitutes penance” (62).

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